It’s never a good idea to underestimate a powerful woman. It’s even less smart when she’s packing 120-km/h winds.

Researchers examining six decades’ worth of hurricane data in the U.S. have discovered that hurricanes with female names have caused significantly more deaths than hurricanes with male names.

When they conducted a series of followup experiments, they discovered that participants presented with a hypothetical hurricane judged the storm to be less intense and risky if it carried a female name. They were also less likely to report they would heed a voluntary evacuation order.

Studies have already shown that resumés, artwork and scientific papers carrying a woman’s name are implicitly judged to be less important and credible than those carrying a man’s.

This is the first piece of research to suggest sexism can actually kill you.

“It’s significant because it potentially shows that gender stereotypes can have life-and-death effects,” says Susan Fiske, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton who oversaw the review process for the paper, which is published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“What still needs to be done is to figure out the mechanisms: why is this happening?”

The research team, led by Kiju Jung and Sharon Shavitt at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, examined archival data on Atlantic hurricane fatalities from 1950 to 2012. All hurricanes were given female names until 1979, when alternating men’s and women’s names were introduced as a nod to gender equality.

The researchers asked “blind” coders to rank the names of all the storms — more than 90 — on a scale from more masculine to more feminine. In smaller, less-damaging storms, the gender of the hurricane had no effect on predicting fatalities. But in severe storms, the effect was significant: naming a hurricane Eloise versus Charley could nearly triple the death toll, the authors found.

The signal would be even more skewed if the researchers hadn’t removed two outlier hurricanes from the analysis: Katrina, which killed 1,833 people in 2005, and Audrey, which killed 416 in 1957.

In one experiment, 346 study participants given five male and five female names from this year’s roster of Atlantic hurricane names predicted the male ones would be more intense — regardless of the participant’s own gender. Next, 108 participants were randomly assigned one of three scenarios involving Hurricane Alexandra, Hurricane Alexander or an unnamed hurricane. They read a short scenario about uncertainty over the storm’s future intensity. Asked to judge the storm’s riskiness, Hurricane Alexander was judged to be riskier than Alexandra or the nameless storm.

In similar experiments testing subjects’ willingness to evacuate, participants were more likely to report they would evacuate for a male-named storm than a female-named storm.

“Our study suggests that this is a very implicit effect. It happens under the radar. People aren’t aware they’re using these categories to judge storms,” says Shavitt.

Critics of the study, however, pointed out that the death toll effects which the study purports to show were weaker after discounting hurricanes prior to 1979, when all storms had female names.

“I feel that their analysis has basically shown that individuals respond to gender. I am not sure it has applicability to hurricane response. I certainly would not base policy decisions on this study alone!” said Jeff Lazo with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who studies the integration of weather and social science.

Clare Nullis, a spokesperson for the World Meteorological Organization, said that “WMO has no plans to re-examine hurricane naming conventions because they are internationally agreed and function well on the whole.” The names are always short, easy to remember, non-political and culturally appropriate, Nullis added.

Hazel Markus, a behavioural scientist at Stanford University, called the study “important and very well done.”

The biggest take-away, she said, is “for people to notice that these associations are constantly being stoked and fuelled. That gender is always being coded in this way. We really need to do something about it — and we can, with our own actions.”

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